Toronto is ideally situated to harbour art thieves, so how do we prevent this from happening?

Given Toronto’s climb to the upper reaches of regularly appearing lists of the fastest-growing this or the most-expensive that, it may seem Hogtown has come of age in the market for stolen art, too. It hasn’t, at least as far as anyone can tell, but that may soon change.

Any such change, though, will require a far more systematic approach to dealing with art theft. Police, dealers and collectors will have to collaborate to prevent a small industry here becoming larger. It will mean collecting stats, forming an art theft squad and, most of all, speaking out loud about a practice still not taken as seriously as it should be.

Toronto remains a smaller player in the $6-billion a year trade in stolen cultural property, even though there’s been a ramp-up in thefts in recent years. The latest was two weeks ago when five Group of Seven paintings and six other works with a total worth of almost $400,000 disappeared from a midtown gallery, although robberies began with the 2004 heist of ivory carvings worth $1.5-million from the Art Gallery of Ontario.

Of course, these are the spectacular thefts that make the news. Others don’t, for a variety of reasons, one of them being that most thefts are from private residences, such as the spate of burglaries in posh Lawrence Park late last year. It’s unlikely a householder would contact the media because his Jack Shadbolt painting has been stolen, although the police may. Similarly, about 85% of the thefts from museums are inside jobs, so curators may just want to get the art back then quietly fire the employee. As a result, under-reporting appears to be the norm. Add to this the fact Toronto Police and the RCMP’s Toronto detachment don’t have art theft squads.

Joshua Knelman, who’s written and researched extensively on art theft, says asking how much has been stolen in the city is essential to understanding the depth and scope of the problem and so devising strategies to counter it. Unfortunately, no one seems to have an answer. Once in a while, a blockbuster theft is reported, Knelman says, but asking how many times a year a Toronto gallery is robbed or how many times a year a stolen painting is reported to the police is difficult to know because such statistics aren’t collected systematically.

“In terms of basic information, we don’t have enough of it. I know from doing cursory visits to galleries around the GTA … if it’s a smaller gallery and there’s not very many people around, I’ll ask: ‘I’ve been writing a book on art theft and I’m wondering if you’ve had any experience of that.’ More often than not the answer has been ‘yes.’ ”

Bonnie Czegledi, a Toronto artist and lawyer who has made the art field her legal specialty, says there’s a surprising amount of legitimate art trading that goes on here. “We have major museums, major galleries, several art gallery districts, great communities of artists, very principled dealers and collectors. And, the big auction houses are here. There is a lot of trade, and with that comes the not-nice element.” That includes organized crime, and there’s no reason to think Toronto is excluded from it, Czegledi says.

These gangs may not be the traditional mafias running the traditional rackets, but they’re not the debonair chaps of fiction, either. Mark Durney, business and admissions director for the Association for Research into Crimes Against Art’s MA program in New York, says there are some thieves who are “art-motivated,” but most are interested in profit. Even Vincenzo Perugia, convicted of stealing the Mona Lisa from the Louvre 100 years ago this August, thought he could make money off the painting before switching tactics and claiming to be an Italian patriot.

All observers concede profit-oriented thieves could be anyone. Knelman won’t say who would be among the more likely suspects, although he warns against “knockers,” using the British word for an accomplice who walks up to a house and knocks on the front door hoping to win a glimpse inside. Czegledi is less circumspect, mentioning caregivers, gardeners and construction workers as the type of service providers who have easy access to private homes and thus opportunities to size up what’s on the wall.

And once a painting is stolen, what then? Where in Toronto does the thief sell his booty? That depends on his smarts. “Often the thieves don’t have the social or marketing skills to sell what they’ve stolen,” Durney says. Brains aren’t something Antonio Arch credits Toronto art thieves as having. “Only an imbecile would steal in this city,” says Arch, a consultant and dealer at Arch + Company Fine Arts in Toronto and Grand Cayman. For one thing, the market’s still too small to provide much cover, but he acknowledges hard economic times may drive some to crime.

It may be that stolen art can’t be fenced here, but that doesn’t mean the city is without its advantages for the dishonest. Toronto’s not far from New York City, a huge venue for art and the impressive money that chases it, says Knelman, whose book Hot Art: Chasing Thieves and Detectives through the Secret World of Stolen Art (D&M Publishers) is out in September. Durney has a similar point of view. He compares Canada with Spain when it comes to shifting art. They both sit on the edge of massive markets with largely open borders and so make trafficking relatively easy and attractive. “Once a thief passes [a work] on, the trail gets a little more complex,” Knelman explains. Durney would agree. He conducted research on a private international database of 115,000 art objects stolen between 2000 and 2009. The recovery rate was just 1.9%.